Saturday, January 30, 2016

Cab Thoughts 1/30/16

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate (11 Dec 1918-2008)
 

In 1978, Former Board of Supervisors member Dan White murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall in San Francisco, California. The story is complex but White was arrested and tried. But he claimed "diminished capacity" because he had eaten junk food prior to the killing. Despite the obvious evidence that this was a carefully planned attack, White was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder. He received 5 years. This was the "Twinkie Defense."
 
From an article by Max Boot: The only way to accomplish the fall of ISIS is by mobilizing Sunni Arabs to rise up against it as they rose up against its predecessor, al-Qaida, in Iraq in 2007. And that won't happen unless the U.S. and its allies offer Sunnis some assurance that they will not be trading the tyranny of ISIS for the tyranny of Shiite rule.
 
Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the Solar System's main asteroid belt with a diameter of about 950 kilometers. Exploring Ceres from orbit since March, the Dawn spacecraft's camera has revealed about 130 or so mysterious bright spots, mostly associated with impact craters scattered around the small world's otherwise dark surface. The brightest one is near the center of the 90 kilometer wide Occator Crater. A study now finds the bright spot's reflected light properties are probably most consistent with a type of magnesium sulfate called hexahydrite. Of course, magnesium sulfate is also known to Earth dwellers as epsom salt. Haze reported inside Occator also suggests the salty material could be left over as a mix of salt and water-ice sublimates on the surface. Since impacts would have exposed the material, Ceres' numerous and widely scattered bright spots may indicate the presence of a subsurface shell of ice-salt mix. In mid-December, Dawn will begin taking observations from its closest Ceres mapping orbit.

Fugacious: adj: 1. Lasting but a short time; fleeting. 2. fleeting; transitory: a sensational story with but a fugacious claim on the public's attention. Fugacious has roots in the Latin verb fugere meaning "to flee." It entered English in the early 1600s.
 
EchoPixel is building a new world of patient care with its interactive, 3D medical visualization software. The True 3D system allows medical professionals to interact with patient-specific organs and tissue in an open 3D space emanating from a display, enabling doctors to immediately identify, evaluate, and dissect clinically significant structures. In diagnostic, surgical planning and image guided treatment applications, EchoPixel technology amplifies human expertise and improves both clinical efficacy and workflow.
EchoPixel is a privately held, venture backed company located at the Fogarty Institute for Innovation in Mountain View, CA.
(From their website)


Apparently pot does matter to the white matter. If you look at the corpus callosum, what we’re seeing is a significant difference in the white matter between those who use high potency cannabis and those who never use the drug, or use the low-potency drug, according to a pot researcher.
 
In June 1940, France fell to the Nazis, and Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson went to Spain. During this period, the Nazis concocted a scheme to kidnap Edward with the intention of returning him to the British throne as a puppet king. George VI, like his prime minister, Winston Churchill, was adamantly opposed to any peace with Nazi Germany. Unaware of the Nazi kidnapping plot but conscious of Edward’s pre-war Nazi sympathies, Churchill hastily offered Edward the governorship of the Bahamas in the West Indies. The duke and duchess set sail from Lisbon on August 1, 1940, narrowly escaping a Nazi SS team sent to seize them.
 
A person can will a tattoo to a loved one just like any other possession. A kit is mailed to the funeral home. Once the tattoo is removed, it is put through a chemical and enzymatic process to permanently alter the structure of the tissue and stop it from decaying. Then it is framed! This is becoming a business.  I have an option for those too squeamish for the tattoo dissection: Professional pictures of the tattoos which are then put in frames as a collage. Better than ashes.
 
The U.S. has released spy Jonathan Pollard. Some will say this is an effort for the administration to ingratiate itself to Israel, for whom Pollard did much of his spying. But Pollard was a spy for anyone; he did it for money. The Navy's prosecution found that he repeatedly tried to sell Pakistan secrets, which in the following decade became the first Islamic state to build nuclear arms, and is no friend of Israel. He also gave secrets to South Africa, which in the 1960s helped Israel become a nuclear power. He did a lot of damage and it will linger. His release is weird. Most other times in history he would have been executed.
 
Egyptologists and followers of mysticism have been fascinated for centuries by the fact that the Great Pyramid at Giza seems to approximate pi. The vertical height of the pyramid has the same relationship to the perimeter of its base as the radius of a circle has to its circumference.

Lorentz force is the total force exerted on a charged particle by electric and magnetic fields.

Donald Trump has very little chance of being president. His odds are at 8 percent, compared to 55 percent for Hillary Clinton, according to ElectionBettingOdds.com. So why the scrutiny of Trump and not Hillary?
 
There simply cannot be compound growth in a finite world. A modest 1% growth compounded for the 3,000 years of Ancient Egypt’s population would have multiplied its economic output by nine trillion times! Yet, the improbability of feeding ten billion or so global inhabitants in 50 years is shrugged off with ease. And the entire economic and political system appears eager to encourage optimism on resources for it is completely wedded to the virtues of quantitative growth forever. Corrections and rebalancing are inevitable.

To Have and Have Not (1945) is the only instance when a Nobel prize-winning author (Ernest Hemingway) was adapted for the screen by another Nobel-winning author (William Faulkner).
 
Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who insisted every day on decrying the violence and terror that ruled his country, was murdered during mass on Monday, March 24, 1980. Romero’s murder and the mayhem and bloodshed set off by a sharpshooter at his funeral the following Saturday were perhaps the immediate sparks for the bloody twelve-year civil war that started in El Salvador just months later and killed some 70,000 Salvadorans, with the United States providing financial and military backing to the government side. It is hard to overstate how fervently the campesinos of El Salvador believed in Romero and what became known as the Liberation Church. When he was gone, entire villages placed themselves at the disposal of the guerrilla factions, which came together as a united front, the FMLN.
For The Hall of Unforeseen Consequences.

Nuclear power generates nearly 20% of the nation’s electricity but more than 60% of the carbon-free power. Over the past 50 years, nuclear plants — by offsetting fossil-fuel combustion — have avoided the emission of an estimated 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide. And because of natural gas, the U.S. is one of the few countries that has decoupled GDP growth from emissions growth.
 
Golden oldie:
 
The Bradley effect is an attempt to explain discrepancies between polling results and voting results. The theory proposes that some voters who intend to vote for the white candidate would nonetheless tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for the non-white candidate because they were afraid the pollster would think less of them. It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor's race despite being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.  
There is some anxiety among the powers-that-be that Trump may be stronger than he appears in the polls because the press is so opposed to him and the voter is reluctant to admit support for him.
 
ISIS is reportedly training pilots in Sirte, Libya, a city just across the Mediterranean Sea from the shores of Italy. ISIS is believed to be building up a base in Libya in case the international coalition operating in Iraq and Syria manages to dislodge them from the territory they hold there. The rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria is a result of the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq, but its ascendancy in Libya is a result of the 2011 U.S. intervention in that country, one that Hillary Clinton gave her full-throttled support as secretary of state. Clinton also voted for the Iraq war back in 2003.

Although anorexia is more common among young people than any other age group, it is more deadly in the elderly. From 1986 to 1990, the elderly accounted for 78% of all deaths due to anorexia.
 
AAAAAAnnnnnndddddd.......a video of the world's most simple motor:

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